I'm Luke

Of course it all started at midnight. If he knew one thing about necromancy, it always started at midnight.

Lorcan Verdigris used to plan his days around midnight. He’d been a teen at the time, so a fucked-up sleep schedule wasn’t as disastrous as it could have been. And midnight hit a sweet spot—a liminal moment when the veil between worlds was thin and certain magics got easier, dark enough to satisfy the fledgling adolescent rebellion.

He couldn’t miss out on that.

Twelve years later, he still felt some nostalgia for the so-called ‘witching hour’. But things had changed since Lorcan decided to get his life together. Now he was an adult with a fucked-up sleep schedule.

It was good Lorcan was his own employer, and his kids didn’t care about mortal, human needs like sleep. That was the thing about being a self-employed freelance stay-at-home dad-slash-wizard: the days were predictable right until they weren’t.

Lorcan was really starting to miss ‘predictable’.

Chapter 1: Witching Hour

- 11:12 PM ON A TUESDAY -

- FORTY-EIGHT MINUTES BEFORE MIDNIGHT -

“Dad? …Dad. Dad.”

A tug on Lorcan’s pants pulled him from troubled thoughts. “Yeah, Terry?”

“Can I eat a spider?”

He glanced down at Terry, who faced him innocently. It was a pretty normal question to hear from a child. But Lorcan’s kids were far from normal. “Terry, you’re a rug,” he said. “My permission doesn’t change the fact that you don’t have a mouth. Why do you want to eat a spider, anyways?”

“To assert dominance.”

“Sorry I asked.”

The object in his hand wasn’t going to tell him any more about itself just by staring at it—well, it probably wouldn’t, anyway. But if the thing was alive, it was good at staring contests. Lorcan set it down gently on the ugly faux-driftwood coffee table in front of his couch. An orange lava lamp was sitting there already, next to the TV remote.

(It wasn’t his coffee table, he should specify. The driftwood aesthetic was making a comeback. For a self-employed working artist, that meant both commissions from rich minimalists and endless email tag to get them to actually pick up their orders.)

“Vulk, check that for curses,” he instructed, before heading to the kitchen.

Terry followed, undulating low against the ground. “You don’t understand, Dad. They’re making fun of me. Said my weaving sucked.”

Terry’s weaving did suck.

But in Terry’s defense, Terry was a small throw rug using a hand loom to weave other, smaller rugs. Which was impressive no matter how you sliced it.

This was supposed to be a lazy evening, Lorcan thought wistfully. He’d made the executive decision to drag the TV out of its basement storage just for the occasion. It meant an awkward elevator ride while he tried to remember which of his neighbors it was giving him a silent death glare on the way up, and whether they had good reason to hate him.

(They probably did.

Didn’t mean he wouldn’t glare back.)

He hadn’t even had the chance to make lunch. Which he was doing in the middle of the night. (Sleep cycle, fucked up, et cetera.) But food was easy enough to deal with—Lorcan had a system. The fridge was full of takeout leftovers, with dates of purchase scrawled on the lid. Not super healthy. Better than watching fresh groceries spoil every week.

Lorcan grabbed the oldest box, mentally checked his math on the noodles’ freshness, and dumped them on a plate to microwave.

As the timer counted down, he nudged Terry away from a spot of sauce on the floor. Someone had to watch for stains. He announced to the rest of the apartment, “I want to note the events of tonight have vindicated my policy of never checking the mail.”

That got groans.

A voice from the living room, that sounded like it was going through a tunnel, protested, “It would still be cursed if you hadn’t opened it!”

Operator was a vintage-style rotary candlestick phone who liked to think of themself as Lorcan’s secretary. Op had been the one pushing him the hardest to clean out his mailbox while he grabbed the TV, so it made sense they were taking this personally.

“Receipt of a curse doesn’t count until it’s opened, actually,” he told them. You needed some dark postal magic to mail a curse that triggered on simple delivery, and Lorcan hadn’t seen any pentacles on the stamp. “My laziness is deliberate and well-cultivated.”

“What if you get jury duty, though?”

A decent question. Lorcan took the parental privilege of not answering.

“Just dump it in a salt bath,” Op suggested next. “That breaks curses.”

Lorcan opened the microwave before it could beep (see, Pam, he could be a considerate neighbor sometimes). It was a good thing that particular appliance had never gained sentience, seeing as it was bolted into the cupboard.

“Dice might be immune,” he noted aloud.

Magic was a complicated art, emphasis on art. It was how Lorcan had known in an instant the twenty-sided die mailed to him in a small manila envelope had been made by someone wizardy. Like a lot of dice, it was made of resin—properly cured and free of air bubbles. It had been colored a dark, shimmering blue, with bronze mica suspended in soft ripples. Rounded corners, numbers painted in perfectly.

The thing was handmade, and it was quality. The work of an expert at their craft.

In magic, function followed form. Enchanted dice (or cursed ones) worked…well, like dice. Nothing about the resin, specifically, would keep a good salt soak from breaking a low-level curse. But Lorcan was pretty sure dice were traditionally tested for fairness by floating them in saltwater. That could insulate a curse hidden inside, keep that old mainstay from working.

But Lorcan had other options. “Vulk?” he asked. “Status on that curse hunt?”

The thing didn’t answer.

Lorcan rolled his eyes. He walked back to the coffee table, set his noodles down, and shut off the TV.

That got his attention.

“Bogus!” The lava lamp on the table made his anger clear by lighting up and… bubbling, slightly, within his waxy center. Vulcan may have been named for a god of volcanoes, but Krakatoa, he was not. “I was watching that!”

“Look alive, Vulk. The die—cursed?”

“Yes,” the lamp said. “Wait. No. Wait. Can I change my answer?”

“Seriously?”

Vulk—somehow a master of the puppy dog pout despite not having a face—waved his plug at Lorcan accusingly. “You said I wouldn’t have to think today, hep cat. And you are harshing my mellow with your bad vibes. So not copacetic.”

Lorcan had promised that. But: “You could try taking on a little responsibility every now and again.”

“And let my hair go gray like yours?” Vulk didn’t have hair. He was a lava lamp. “Pass.”

“That’s not fair,” Loretta said out loud. And it wasn’t, but Lorcan didn’t need her to come to his rescue. She was a small desk lamp, situated in the living room. “You know he’s sensitive about that.”

Lorcan ran a hand through—uh, his hair. The hair was a point of bruised vanity, and all the kids knew it. Lorcan’s appearance…well, he did his best with it. He’d given up on wearing contacts years ago, but a touch of eyeliner went a long way. His stud earrings proved he had a little bit of pride. The hair was the problem. He cut it short and it grew out mostly black, shot through with streaks of silver that got bigger by the day.

He was twenty-seven.

Someone pointed out, “Dad can always get it dyed if he’s so upset.”

“Lorcan would have to actually leave the apartment for that,” Operator countered.

“He can order box dye online.”

“But he can’t use it.”

“I see it’s Talk About Lorcan in the Third Person Day,” Lorcan said loudly. Who was he kidding. That was every day. Because everyone had an opinion about how he should live his life. “I’m in the room. I have ears.”

“At least when he’s not sleeping,” Terry third-personned.

Lorcan sighed. (The younger kids often did not fully understand the concept of sleep.) “So the spiders are talking to us now?” he asked, to change the subject. “Or did Terry, like, channel the spirit of Arachne with a twenty dollar loom I bought from Target?”

Not actually a rhetorical question; magic was weird like that.

He had an instinct in his head, like someone was raising a hand. Oh, now she cared about taking turns. Lorcan bit his lip, and instead asked, “Vulk?” He ignored the flicker of irritation in his brain that wasn’t his.

Yes, Loretta probably knew exactly what was going on with the spiders. She was ambitious like that. But it wasn’t good to let a child shoulder the burden of managing a whole household’s problems. It was unhealthy, and fostered self-esteem issues that could carry into adulthood.

Dad, a thought crept into his mind, flatly annoyed.

Loretta, he thought back. He’d read a parenting book once. He knew what he was talking about.

If anyone should try to be responsible, it was Vulk, who was both the oldest and also Lorcan’s magical familiar. “Uh.” Vulk froze, then asked “Wasn’t Frank supposed to be watching the spiders?”

The big floor lamp let out an angry creak, and his bulb flashed, <Not my job>.

Frank could speak, but he did not like to. Blinks in Morse did the trick well enough. Since he was set up in the spider-heavy back corner, Frank had provided a few early warnings for enemy action. But as he said, it was not in fact his job.

Lorcan sighed. “Loretta.”

“They’re using the magnets you set up.” She glowed (literally) under the silent, begrudging gratitude he sent her way.

“Took them long enough,” he muttered.

He’d be the first to admit he let the spider situation get out of hand. Probably should have just taken a broom to it before they evolved far enough for their extermination to get ethically dubious. But his apartment was crap, and keeping it clean was a Sisyphean task. There were pipes to rust-proof, cracks to plaster, dust to dust. Maintenance had long since stopped answering his calls. At some point, he figured a few cobwebs could only help the aesthetic. His kids were immune to venom, so in the worst case only Lorcan had to start building a tolerance.

What he’d overlooked was the effect his…apartment would have on the spiders. The way evolution might sharpen an otherwise-animal hunting instinct. Their last strike team may have hilariously overestimated the tensile strength of web, but the tripwire snare trap outside Lorcan’s bedroom door was a cut above the usual predation tactics of the common house spider.

As the saying went: once bitten, twice shy. Or—he scratched the still-tender skin on his wrist—twenty to…thirty-seven…times bitten. That tolerance couldn’t come soon enough.

He respected the hustle, if nothing else.

But if a singularity of super-intelligent spiders was evolving on his lease, that was really going to piss off the landlord. Lorcan wished he could say having to house-train a semi-murderous spider colony was the weirdest thing to ever happen to him. But he had over two dozen children who were furniture, and also alive. The bar was high.

So, he’d scattered refrigerator magnets near their nest to try and Charlotte’s Web some inter-species communication. (He was not inviting his animal-talking sister over to negotiate on his behalf.)

“Are they gonna be new siblings?” Vulk asked. “Because I don’t want to be a big brother again unless it’s for a Roomba.”

“No. They were alive before m—” He sighed. “Before the magic messed with them. It’s different from you guys.”

His kids were weird, even for magic. Usually when an object ‘came to life’ it was because a self-perpetuating moonbeam thought a mirror was pretty enough to inhabit for a decade or two, you know? And the spiders were spiders. Lorcan’s kids…they were permanently linked to their objects, the same as a newborn human soul to a body. It happened sometimes. Especially around him. “And I said no on the Roomba.”

“Aw.”

“And can you check for a curse already? We don’t know anything about who sent this, or why.” Lorcan hated flying blind when magic was involved. “We need as much information out of the die as we can get—”

“Did you read the envelope it came with?”

Lorcan looked at his oldest. His oldest wiggled his power cord.

“I’m just saying, it might have some of that information,” Vulk went on.

Look. In Lorcan’s defense. No one ever wanted to talk to him anyway.

He’d tossed the envelope into the trash pile without reading it. It was now buried underneath credit cards ads (sorry, Lorcan was too millennial for debt), political brochures reminding him what a piece of shit their mayor was (he knew), and the local arthouse makerspace co-op indie newsletter his mother had pushed him to sign up for.

(Somebody really had to tell them they couldn’t advertise magical services on the front page where every normal person and their Satanic-panicked aunt could see. Like, this stuff was semi-secret for a reason.)

Lorcan paused a moment on the letter from his landlord, written in a predictably-angry red. Doris the umbrella looked at it and flapped her canopy sadly.

“We have a stalemate,” he told his daughter, firm. “He knows the terms.”

Here it was. The envelope had been padded, and the die nearly rolled out once Lorcan opened it. He was just glad he’d been able to catch it. Looking at it now…

“It’s addressed to ‘Current Resident’,” he said, confused. Sure, the return address was a P.O. box, but, “Who curses a current resident?” Lorcan had some petty enemies, he’d admit. But this was a new level.

“It’s not cursed,” Vulk spoke up. “I don’t feel any magic on it at all.”

And. Alright. Vulk was lazy, but he’d never lied (convincingly) about something Lorcan had asked him to look at. Even so, “That can’t be right.”

He walked back to the coffee table and picked up the die. Lorcan glared at it, like that might somehow reveal more than Vulk’s empowered sense for magic. Function followed form, he thought; maybe it needed to be rolled for the effects to be noticeable.

Now that Vulk had done his one job, the lamp turned the TV back on. “Hey, are these noodles for me?” he asked. “I’ve been jonesing for some grub.”

“For the last time, Vulk,” Lorcan replied, all focus on the die, “you do not eat.”

“There’s something else in this.”

Lorcan turned—he hadn’t even noticed Doug moving towards the mail pile. In a feat of dexterity Lorcan doubted he could replicate, his younger son had the envelope pinched open and a piece of card stock shimmied out before he could even blink. Doug was a coat rack.

“It’s an invitation to dinner at T&C,” Doug announced. “Tomorrow.”

“You got an invite to dinner?” Doris asked, turning to Lorcan.

“The current resident got an invite to dinner,” he corrected her. Which—that was weirder than the idea of being cursed at random. Who invited a total stranger to a dinner date? Plus, Tea & Charmalade…as the name implied, it was popular with the magic crowd. But it didn’t do reservations. You showed up, and they found you a spot.

Who invited a magical stranger to a dinner date?

“That doesn’t matter,” Doug said. “It has a dress code.” He’d always been the most fashion-forward of Lorcan’s children: he breathed the words out with awed reverence.

It was easy to read the card from behind Doug’s pole. “‘Casual elegant’,” Lorcan said. “What even is that?”

“It’s class, is what it is!” His weight dropped onto Lorcan’s shoulder. Lorcan bit back a wince. The hooks. “You have to go. You haven’t gone out in ages, and this has a dress code!”

“Doug. Doug. Shoulder.”

The coat rack pulled back upright, and Lorcan rubbed the small bruise.

“Tomorrow’s kind of short notice,” he said.

“It’s postmarked two weeks ago,” Op informed him. “You’re just lucky you opened it in time to go.”

Yeah. Lucky. “Do I get a say in this?”

“Dress code, Lorcan!” Another push from Doug, and the die was fumbling from his fingers. It clattered and bounced—one might even say ‘rolled’—across his dusty apartment floor.

“Doug!” Lorcan snapped.

His son wilted back, looking crestfallen (and don’t ask how Lorcan could tell that—he had a lot of practice reading expressions without faces).

Lorcan could have a temper, he knew. He never liked when that anger burst out at his kids. But rolling mysterious magical dice was exactly how you got yourself Jumanji’d, and Lorcan couldn’t be exactly sure what his children would survive.

Neither of them got transported to a terrifying game realm—at least, not within the next twelve seconds—and Lorcan didn’t feel the hiccup in time that would tell even his meager senses a major work of magic was at play. So he crouched down to get a better look at the thing.

“Hey, Vulk,” Lorcan called back toward the table. “You know geek stuff, right?”

“Um, Star Trek is actually super mainstream now—”

“Those dice they use for tabletop games,” Lorcan cut him off. “Low numbers are usually bad, right?”

Vulk was silent for half a minute. “You rolled a one, didn’t you?”

He might have.

“Yeah, that’s super bad.” A pause. “No curse feel, though.”

“Great,” Lorcan said. After a moment of consideration, he put the die in his pocket. If this was a trap, he’d already tripped it.

Terry nudged at his leg, in the silence after. “Dad. Spiders.”

Lorcan rubbed his face. It was always something. “Fine, Terry. I will talk to the spiders.”

The spiders’ aesthetic sensibilities had gotten picky—pretentious, even (which is how Lorcan knew he was dealing with human-level intelligence). Their current style hewed Neoplastic; the Platonic solids especially seemed to tickle their fancy. Not that they were great at replicating them yet, which might explain the bloodlust. Wouldn’t be the first time art block led to murder attempts.

Still, they’d probably be learning magic any day now just from proximity. Lorcan needed to make peace before they started casting battle spells about it.

The message they’d left was behind the couch, in bright plastic letters. Lorcan hoisted himself over to see, in the middle of one large cobweb:

DIE HU MAN

Lorcan hopped back over the couch and planted himself in front of the TV with Vulk. Two crises was enough for one night. He’d deal with that later.

Ooh, Cake Wars.

-

Five cakes and a Batter-Up later, at the moment his ever-ticking internal clock told him was -MIDNIGHT EXACTLY- Lorcan felt time slow.

When a significant magical working took effect, those with a talent for the craft could feel it in some way. He needed Vulk’s help to spot the subtler ones, but big spells carried weight. For Lorcan, it was like a moment outside of time. The air stilled. Sound fell silent. And the chaos at the center of his beating heart found equilibrium.

Like all moments, it couldn’t last.

Time came back with an out-of-season chill—then a furious, soul-wrenching wail. Lorcan startled in his seat, heart racing. That was weird, he thought. The pipes normally only howled with the lamentations of the restless dead on Fridays.

He shut off the TV, ignoring Vulk’s panicked “But Lorcan, the Cake-Off!”

“Anyone hurt?” he asked the things, putting on his glasses.

Terry reported, “I stuck my corner in the loom again.”

“Okay. That’s—I meant with the screaming, Terry.”

“That’s not what you asked.”

“Was anyone hurt when the scream happened?”

No’s all around, and he relaxed a bit. It wasn’t impossible that the gnashing sounds of anguish had been part of an offensive spell. But if it were Lorcan planning an attack he’d have done it. You know. Stealthily.

Whatever it was, he’d need to settle things quick. His neighbors put up with enough as it was—if Lorcan had to add un-scheduled lamentations to the list, Pam might finally get the support to force the landlord out of their stalemate.

Frank flickered his light, just as another shriek began: <Web glows.>

Not on Lorcan’s fucking watch it didn’t.

“I’ve been nice,” he announced, stomping over to the spiders’ nest, “but if you’re casting dangerous magic in the apartment where my kids live, I will get the Raid—”

He stopped.

Magic could be weird. But so could science. There was an electrical phenomenon Lorcan knew of that happened in thundering sea storms: an ionized, flame-like glow would appear on the metal fixings of ships. St. Elmo’s Fire, old scholars called it. The same kind of light as auroras in the sky. It was easy to understand how, before the science of electrons had been all figured out, sailors on a capsizing ship might mistake the phenomenon for something otherworldly.

The spiders had to be thinking the same now, as gouts of ionic fire lit their web. They clung, desperate, while its threads bucked and shook in tempo with the wails around. Like a cello forced to dance by an unforgiving bow.

This wasn’t simple science, and it wasn’t the spiders.

No, Lorcan recognized that light.

“Necromanteion, emergency drawer,” he instructed his kids.

The wailing made it difficult to hear the faint, scraping creak of plywood against plywood. The crash against the kitchen linoleum six seconds later was much louder.

It sucked sometimes, being the only member of the household with hands.

“Good try, kitchen gang,” Lorcan said. The contents of his emergency drawer had scattered, and in some cases broken, across the floor of his kitchenette. He sorted through the pile. “Terry couldn’t have caught any of this?”

“I’m stuck! In the loom!”

Right, right.

But the flashlight and mirror were what he needed right now, and they were both undamaged. A necromanteion was a dark mirror, almost pitch black. Function and form: necromanteions revealed things which sought to remain unseen. But only to eyes that could see it. To see through a necromanteion, a person had to have looked another human being in the eyes and watched as life left them.

Lorcan had made his from a rectangular compact. Easy to carry and use, especially when he needed to aim a flashlight at it. Light, and a mirror of death. By bouncing one off the other, Lorcan could wield the properties of the necromanteion on a much larger scale. (That was just basic magic optics.)

Where the light fell on the spiders’ shaking web, Lorcan saw ghosts.

They were small ghosts, thankfully. Flies and ants and the occasional larger beetle the spiders had ganged up on and eaten. All summoned back at once to the material plane. It was their screams making that wail, sheer numbers turning animal anguish to something more human. The glow from his flashlight cast them in a rainbow shimmer.

(It tickled Lorcan’s memory, but he didn’t have time to place it.)

There were ghosts in his apartment. And where there were ghosts, there was—

“That looks like necromancy,” Loretta said carefully, from across the room. She couldn’t see the ghosts, the sweet summer child. But she was savvy enough to know why Lorcan was rattled.

He tried to keep his own voice level as he replied, “Yep.”

He took the die from his pocket and, crouching down, slid (not rolled) it towards the nest. It didn’t react—no special glow, no counting down ominously with its faces. And he didn’t know any necromancers who used dice in their craft.

“Still nothing, Vulk?” he asked.

“I mean obviously there’s dead stuff here. But the dee-twenty still isn’t magic.”

Well. Lorcan was maybe going to have to trust his son that these were actually unrelated.

“Bug-ghosts are weak in the grand scheme of things,” he announced, to reassure Loretta. “If this person wanted to kill us with that, they’d be putting more ‘oomph’ into it. It’s probably not an attack, more an attempt at—”

The wails hit an unholy crescendo, then dropped to a low background hum. The webs shook hard enough to knock the magnets to the floor.

“—communication,” he finished. Because no necromancer had ever used a goddamn cellphone when an invisible choir would do. The aurora thinned. Rays of light whipped out to grab fallen letters, re-weaving them into a new message:

VERDIGRIS

WE DEMAND YOUR PRES NC M T US IMM DIAT LY

Lorcan leaned against the back of the couch. Whoever this was, they knew his name. “Running out of letters?” he asked, half to test if this new ghostly communicator could hear him, and half because. Well. “I’m not surprised, I only bought like two packs.”

SHUT UP

“Those were the last S’s and U’s,” he noted. “Just an observation.”

The words shook in place, as if to convey how serious their message was without wasting precious fridge decorations.

He imagined the effect would be more impressive if he’d found an apartment off of Graveslist like a self-respecting necromancer. Speaking through the dead had more panache when there was an appropriately ghoulish murder victim nearby to hijack. Unfortunately for this asshole, Lorcan lived in a dull neighborhood.

“You could start over, if it helps. There were four of each, I think?”

The web was still for a while. Lorcan wondered if they were about to try with the letters they had left out of spite. He hoped so; that would be hilarious. Just as he thought that, the letters fell to the floor to start over.

There was a final message, two lines long:

MEET SOON

THE CROWN OSIRIS

Oh, Lorcan thought, grin dropping from his face. That was a lot less funny. The ghost web vanished. And in the sudden, deathly quiet, Loretta spoke up, “Isn’t Osiris–”

“Yep.”

“Are you going?” Terry asked.

“Don’t think I have much choice.”

The Crown Osiris knew Lorcan’s name. The Crown Osiris wanted to meet him specifically. It never fucking rained, he supposed—two mysterious, magical invitations in one night was Lorcan’s definition of pouring. And he couldn’t ignore Osiris’s, much as he wanted to. This had been the opening salvo. He didn’t want to see what would follow a refusal.

The spiders that were still on the web climbed off it slowly. Lorcan wasn’t sure if their sluggishness was from the cold or the scare.

“You alright there?” he asked, in a low tone. “Osiris can be a lot, I hear.”

One spindled over to the icosahedral die on the floor. It faced him, then the die, and reared back.

“You want it?” Lorcan raised an eyebrow. “Look, I know you’re trying things with shapes, but that might still be cursed—”

The spider gave a tiny hiss, and gestured again at the…oh.

Well, their grasp of the English language was progressing.

“Gotcha. ‘Die, human’ or whatever. Sorry I said anything.” Lorcan rolled his eyes, but nudged the die forward with his foot. Two curses didn’t always make a right, but it wasn’t like the spiders were going to be rolling the damned thing. “It might help with the art block.”

He bit his lip, thinking. Running through options.

“If you do die,” Vulk asked, “can I keep the TV?”

Vote of high confidence, there.

“I’m not gonna die,” Lorcan assured his beloved children, and also Vulk. He went to start extricating Terry from the loom. “I know exactly how to handle this.”

The Crown Osiris, de facto leader of all evil magic-users in the city, wanted to talk to Lorcan, in person. There was only one thing he could do to make it through this in one piece.

The Dark Arts and Crafts, Book 1

Lorcan Verdigris is many things: a time wizard, a misanthrope, and a single father to a household of magically-sentient furniture.

Lorcan Verdigris is not a necromancer. …Anymore.

In the semi-secret subculture of ‘crafters’—artists who channel magic through the act of creation—that matters. Lorcan just needs to keep his head down and make rent with harmless applications of time magic, and no one should care what he used to be. Until an old enemy and new player both show interest. One, with an offer Lorcan can’t refuse. The other, with one he can’t imagine he’d accept.

Now, there’s only so long this time wizard can keep the past from creeping into his present. Someone is trying to steal a powerful necromantic artifact, whose destruction could unleash chaos upon the city. Or save it from an even greater danger. Or do nothing at all. Who knows?

See, this is exactly why Lorcan stopped messing with the stuff.

Being a writer is about making choices. Every layer of a text, every word and phrase, is a choice. And that's terrifying, let's be real. Some writing choices are ineffective for the work we want to create, and part of growing as writers is learning which ones to use and which to avoid in our own work. When you're a new writer, and you don't know...I think it can feel like a game stacked against you. What if you make a choice, and it's wrong?

The thing is, a part of being an artist is believing in your own work. I often tell writers: you have to be the first person who loves your own work. If you don't love it, how will any of your readers?

Now, that's advice that definitely exists in contradiction with the many complicated realities of being an artist. You're the one who's putting in the work to write your story, seeing every draft and cut scene. You know the parts that you struggled with, the parts you got to a place that was 'good enough', the parts where none of the words ever quite fit. In many ways, being an artist means seeing the worst of your own art--everyone else gets to see the final, completed project. You see the 'mess' it started as. We're all this, is what I'm saying:

And I'm still going to say: you have to love your own work. Even if it's messy. Even if it's so rough to be an artist and have to make something, knowing how many edits and mistakes and "bad choices" you're going to make along the way. Because art is a conversation. When a reader picks up your work, they are going to be engaging with the choices you made, with creative decisions you set forth. The self-deprecating "had a breakdown" attitude may be funny in a GIF, but if a reader looks you in the eye and tells you that you made something which impacted them...you can't deflect that with self-criticism. A writer who has no confidence in their own creative decisions--even if they're able to get advice and feedback and determine what is the "best objective choice" at any creative moment--is never going to be able to have that honest conversation. They're never going to be able to be honest with themselves. Confidence isn't just about countering a feeling that you made a bad choice in how to say something. It's what lets us recognize that we have something valuable to say.

As important as it is to developing writers to build an understanding of effective writing techniques, I would argue it's just as necessary for new writers to cultivate a sense of confidence in themselves and their creative choices. Just like other skills, it can start small: A twist from your premise that you're proud of. A character you like writing. A sentence that came out really well. You did that, and you can do more like it. Your choices as an artist are just as valid as any more-experienced writer's.

Again, I know that feeling--really feeling--this confidence isn't as easy as just. Doing it. Being confident. So here, I do have some tips that might help writers reshape their perspective on their own developing work. Here I'll give the usual caveat that my tips may not work for everyone, and people are welcome to add their own or discuss. That said, I do hope these help.

"I want to write this" is a complete creative decision.

Creative choices are things that change how an audience perceives the work. That's just the basic mechanism of writing; your words make the story. But I think that can sometimes make developing writers who want to write better, more thoughtful stories feel like they have to justify every creative decision they ever make. There has to be a "reason", otherwise it's just..."self-indulgence". So here's tip one: no, it's not. You are allowed to make a writing decision just because you want to and for no other reason. "I just think it's neat" as a writing strategy. Genuinely, I think a lot of writers would benefit greatly from just allowing themselves to make choices because they want to.

Sometimes "I want to write this" has a deeper meaning.

This doesn't contradict the previous advice, I promise. See, when experienced writers talk about their work sometimes...well, it feels like they put so much effort into it. They can talk about the themes and implications and the deep motives behind every single writing choice. And for a new writer, especially one who "just" writes things they like...it can feel like the difference between you and that experienced writer is that they put in all this thought. Having these deep thoughts is what allows them to be such a good writer, and therefore you'll never catch up, etc etc.

Here's the thing: that's completely backwards. It's not that deep thoughts make good writers; it's that good writers have developed the skill of thinking deeply about their own work. Much of writing, at any point, is instinctive. You develop an eye for what is necessary for a given story, and you implement it. Experienced writers just know how to articulate what is happening with their own subconscious thought processes--and any writer can learn to do the same. So if you find yourself really liking a specific idea in your writing, a specific character or plot point...turn it over in your head, and see if you can't shake to the surface what it is that tickles something in your brain. Don't do it to justify the choice, do it to help yourself recognize that your choices are bringing something unique to the story. This step is for you, not for anyone else.

Advice should be about making connections, not taking away options.

This is a big one. Whenever I give people specific writing advice, I try to articulate what it is I think my advice will *add* to their story. If I think they're trying to achieve X, I explain how the new choice supports X compared to the alternative which does Y. And the reason I do it this way is that I want the author to have all the information to make a choice whether or not to take my advice.

I could be totally off-base, after all. What if I've assumed the author wants to achieve X when actually they wanted Y the whole time? What if X is part of the goal, but not so important that it outweighs some negative thing Z my advice will accidentally introduce into the story? I don't have the full context of what the story needs to achieve; only the author does. And I don't want any author to take my advice if they don't agree that it serves their story.

So, to any writer who is ever taking advice, feedback, etc, about something in their story: let advice sit with you. Consider the advice-giver's logic in recommending it, and how that fits with your vision of what the story should be. The biggest difference between experienced and inexperienced writers is not that experienced writers know all the "best things" in writing, it's that they know the cause and effect of a lot of different writing decisions. That's the part you should be paying attention to if you're a new writer, because then you can decide if that effect is actually what you want in your story. If someone tells you never, ever to do X in a work, simply because it's bad writing and only bad writers do it...there are *very* few cases where that advice is actually correct.

Writing devices are tools; you always want as many tools in your toolkit as you can manage. Some will only be useful in specific situations, sure. But allow yourself the option to choose it, should you need. To build confidence, I recommend not looking at writing advice as commands to "do X" or "do Y", but instead a way to articulate the nuanced connection between creative choices and audience reaction--essentially, teaching new writers how to write on purpose. There's a natural confidence that may come when you write on purpose instead of by accident. "I did this, I meant to do this, and I understand why I did this."

Confidence doesn't mean liking 100% of your own creative decisions.

We treat "confidence" sometimes like it's the same as "arrogance". Nobody likes a braggart, so clearly being confident in your own creative decisions is a form of bragging that you shouldn't do, right? You have to make sure at every moment to be aware that your creative decisions could be wrong, or bad, or 'cringeworthy'. It's an instinct that isn't helped by how social media blows up literary criticism--if there's anything more worthy of mockery than a "bad book" in our internet landscape, it's a "bad book" written by someone who thinks it's good. The reflexive counter to that is...well, don't think your stuff is good. Be ready to be told that it's bad and they might have mercy when critics see you understand that, you know that. You had a feeling it was bad the whole time, anyway.

It's an attitude that has a devious synergy with the artistic brain, because we have to be a little self-critical of our own work. Sometimes we worry that a specific element isn't working and we're right. The only way we make our work better is through that evaluation and self-criticism. So obviously, the way to build confidence in one's own choices is not to silence that critical voice forever--but surely we can see how the behavior in the above paragraph isn't any better? When all you let yourself see is self-critique, it grinds you down without building up anything new. And if you can't see anything good in your own work...well, how are you ever going to want to make it better? It's doomerism in writing form: if the work contains nothing of value, isn't it better to just let it die?

You have to be able to remind yourself of what you loved about a story. Yes, it's possible to outgrow a work, to genuinely be done with it, but if you find that happening every time (and to works you had real passion and excitement for!) the problem may be that you're not letting yourself celebrate the wins, the things that you did like and the creative choices you can stand by. Tying into that:

Confidence doesn't have to mean "I picked the best thing". It can just be "I did my best".

Skills develop over time. No one is a perfect genius writer right out of the gate. I think sometimes when a writing group consists of people with different levels of experience, it can feel to newer writers like the more experienced ones "just know" how to write instinctively. Again, it ties into the idea that there's one correct answer to any writing decision (clearly, these other writers know what that answer is!), but...no. Writing is a skill everyone had to hone. It took time and effort for them, and it will take time and effort for anyone who feels like they're "less talented" than other writers they talk to. What that means is, you will write some bad things and make some bad creative choices. (I promise you, everyone you're thinking of as super cool and talented has done the same.) You can still be proud of the work you've done. Remember the context that you are still growing as a writer. "Your best" now will not be "your best" forever, but it is a stepping stone you can and even *should* celebrate.

(And someday, you might look back on "your best" and be experienced enough to understand the ways that it did fail to reach its full potential. You might feel the need to explain to readers where you went wrong with that choice. The key is, that humility can coexist with confidence. You don't have to believe that a choice is correct forever to have confidence in how you made the choice the first time. "I did the best I could with what I knew at the time, but now I understand better and would do it differently in the future" is still self-confidence.)

In summation:

If you're a writer who finds yourself doubting every decision you make in your work--if you find yourself thinking that every choice has to be approved and validated by an outside party before you can believe it's worthwhile--I think the current mindset is not helpful to your growth as a writer in the long run. I encourage you to look inward, and practice the skill of putting confidence behind your own creative decisions.

I. First Principles

For a lot of people, the challenge in structuring a story seems to be conceptual: how do you fit story-like elements (whether those are early ideas or full scenes) into a true 'story'? Because the confusion exists on a fundamental level, I think the solution needs to break the problem down into the simplest possible steps. If you're a writer who's struggling with this first step of "how do I write story", this approach should hopefully break you out of that block and help you to start actually writing. That's where you'll develop a sense for the complicated nuances that exist within strong stories. The first step is the first step; you'll learn more as you go.

To that end, the guiding principle of this advice is something I call Pick One Thing. I think part of the problem writers can have with turning their ideas/scenes into a story is it feels like you have to pick the absolute, most correct, right way to do it on the first try. And that can be paralyzing. So we're taking that feeling and cutting straight through it with Pick One Thing. It doesn't need to be the correct thing. It just needs to be a thing. If you came into this guide with zero ideas for how to turn your work into a story, guess what--one idea is better than zero ideas. Pick One Thing.

II. What Even Is A Story

There are so, so many models and guides out there explaining the "proper structure" of a story. You've probably seen a few, of varying complexity--some of which might directly contradict each other! But we're breaking things down here. As far as this post is concerned, the real, true structure that almost every story ever follows is:

Look, I said we were simplifying here. But this is a story, in its most basic form: you start with one thing, and you end with another. Point A to Point B. Before and After. Status Quo, to Status No. On a fundamental level, stories are narratives about change.

And I think this is the reason many struggle to turn "ideas" into "story": a lot of character creation and worldbuilding exercises are static. Character profiles encourage you to take a "snapshot" of a character in some present moment--you can sketch out a lot about their personality and inner world, but profiles rarely ask you to consider a moment of dynamic change. Worldbuilding, likewise, often happens on such a large scale that even when change has happened, it feels more like a historical textbook than a story with an engaging journey from Status Quo -> Status No. It can feel overwhelming to try to turn the ideas you get from those kinds of static exercises into a dynamic story.

But here's the good news: if you want to write a story about your characters and world, all you need to is Pick One Thing. Now, you might be wondering--why are we just picking one thing? Aren't good stories layered with plot and character and theme intertwining as we move from Point A and Point B? The answer to both is 'yes'. But if you're having trouble writing any story from what you have, it won't help to push yourself to identify a grand interweaving narrative on your first go. In fact, sometimes the most effective way to figure out what cool layers exist in the story you're writing is to write your story. Which means your first step is to get yourself writing. You need to Pick One Thing.

So here's how you do that. Take your stuff--basic ideas, character lore, worldbuilding notes, scenes, whatever--and Pick One Thing that would be cool as a Point A -> Point B. Literally it can be a "it would be cool if" thought. It can be a "I've never read a story where" thought. It can be a "I want this character to" thought. It doesn't need to be super detailed, and anything that grabs your attention counts as a potential change for your story to follow. If you find it interesting, there are readers out there who will, too.

You can pick it from any aspect of your previous work. Some Quo -> No's are based in the world and setting ("there is at one point an evil emperor who wants to do evil -> there is not that anymore"), some are character-driven ("this character is shy and afraid to make friends -> this character has found their confidence"), and some are very mechanical and plotty ("some thieves want to steal a cool shiny diamond -> they do that"). Now, there's a possibility that you might struggle figuring out what change to apply to your world or character sketches. If what you have is Point A, you have no ideas about what could be Point B. Here's a trick for solving that one: your character/world notes don't have to be the Before half of the equation. You can always write a story about how the character/world got to be where they are now. If your character's a superhero, write the origin story. If your fantasy world had political strife or interesting wars or a cool magical event in the past, write about that. Just Pick One Thing. That's your story now. Don't worry about it being too simple or too obvious or too anything--one thing is better than no things, remember? Pick One Thing.

III. Don't Worry About Three-Act Structure

If you've done any reading about traditional story structures, you've probably seen a lot of jargon about steps within the structure of a story. Don't worry too much about that. We're simplifying, we're breaking down the problem. Most of them translate pretty cleanly into our Status Quo -> Status No framework anyways. The concept of an "Inciting Incident" is basically the first domino that leads the characters out of Status Quo to Status No. "Rising Action" are the other dominoes--the action 'rises' because things tend to get more obvious as the change approaches. The "Climax" is the moment where everything comes to a head--the last possible instant where you can say the Status Quo is true, and the "Resolution" is the first moment where the readers are definitively in the Status No. (Note that, for some works, this change might be more slow and ambiguous, so don't worry too hard about whether you're doing the climax/resolution right.)

It's possible that, once you've Picked One Thing, you'll find these more traditional points of jargon help everything slot into place. But you might not, so our advice isn't going to use the traditional jargon. Instead, we will think of plot beats solely as Dominoes. You stack 'em up, and knock 'em down.

The story structure is still pretty simple at this point: Point A, Dominoes, Point B. And how do we get those dominoes? We Pick One Thing. (Well, technically, we pick a lot of things.)

Write a list of things that you know of which would or could be obstacles to your chosen change. What if the evil emperor has a team of assassins. What if the shy protagonist has to go to a party. What if the cool shiny diamond is in a room full of lasers. Once you're done, congratulations: those are beats in your story that your characters must overcome for the change to happen. Those are now items in your plot structure. That is the purpose of the Dominoes portion of a story: by making it harder for the protagonists to go from Status Quo -> Status No, it's more triumphant when they finally do. And the process of figuring out what those problems should be is, honestly, simpler than I think people build the task up to be in their head. This how the Pick One Thing principle works here: look at the ideas you have for your story, and pick obstacles without worrying if they're the best or most correct. They can just be things you think are cool. Pick One Thing, multiple times, until you have enough to make a set of "Dominoes".

I can see this being a step that trips people up, because it feels like a lot to deal with. But again, this guide aims to be simple. A lot of the complications of the Dominoes step are either "later problems" or solvable with Pick One Thing. Like 1) How many Dominoes do you need to structure your story? The real answer is "it really depends", but the practical answer is just pick a number that feels right to you. Pick One Thing. As you start writing, you're going to get a better sense for scale and pacing, but if you're stuck at the start you'll never develop that intuition. 2) What order should the Dominoes go in? This one you can actually rule-of-thumb it. If you take the dominoes in your list and order them from smallest problem to biggest (like...well, like dominoes) you'll probably be fine. It maintains rising tension, it makes the stakes bigger as the story goes on--if you need to diverge from this pattern, you'll probably figure that out as you write it. And finally, 3) What if I don't know how to solve the problems I've made up in these Dominoes? Here's the best part of the Dominoes method: you don't have to! It doesn't matter for your developing story structure to know the solutions to the problems you introduce. If you're stuck at the outlining stage, don't pile on problems by needing to know *how* your characters overcome them yet. Which, leads, of course, to our final section:

IV: ...Is That It?

I mean, yeah. I think advice of this type, which aims to cover a huge and nebulous step of the writing process often struggles to provide actionable steps for new writers. People come in asking for advice and hoping to get jumped to the end. They're hoping they'll be told what story structure is correct, what way of telling your story is the best, the most effective--but writing is a skill that gets better with practice. And writing *your* story is going to be different from writing any other story because everyone's stories are unique. There's no one-size-fits-all approach, no single plot structure that applies to everything. Just like with tailored clothing, sometimes the best way to get something that fits is to try on something 'close enough', and figure out which parts need fixing.

That's what this method is for. Pick One Thing. Don't psych yourself out by trying to apply a complicated formula to your story. Point A in the story structure should establish what the characters or setting are like before the big change. Show the evil emperor being evil, the shy protagonist being shy, or the thieves not having a cool diamond. The Dominoes will be the bulk of the story, as the protagonists encounter and overcome obstacles. Point B establishes what the characters or setting are like now that the change has happened. The world without an evil emperor, a now-confident protagonist, that cool diamond. That's all you need to get started. Really.

The beauty of an outline is it *will* change. Very few writers are able to nail an outline exactly on the first try, and it's a skill that takes as much time to develop as writing itself. So don't feel like you're locked into these choices as soon as you make them. You're Picking One Thing to get you to the point you can actually *write*--and writing the story will help you figure out how to do it right. If you discover that the central change isn't what you thought it was, or that a certain domino needs to be taken out or changed? That's fine. That's how writing goes. The outline is a skeleton. It can provide structure, but it's not the whole of the thing. The discoveries you make about your story as you write are what "fleshes it out"--they'll help your story to feel richer, deeper, and better.

In Conclusion:

I hope this approach helps. On a basic level, it can be a challenge to move from ideas and scenes to a structured story. By breaking things down in this way I hope it can feel less intimidating to those who were struggling. I love stories, and I love how intricate and detailed they can be, but every story starts with something simple. Your story is no exception.

I do want to try to address some of the other specific options on the poll--this post took a while to write, though, so we'll see what the demand is, I guess? If anyone has follow-up questions about this framework in the comments, I'll do my best to answer.